Four Strategies for Effectively Transitioning from School to Summertime
And six barriers that might make this transition challenging.
Happy first official week of summer!
In The Netherlands, summer is celebrated by families placing the backpacks of their children on flagpoles, which also have the Dutch flag connected with them. The briefcase in this picture may also connote that teachers celebrate the end of school as well.
How is your family celebrating?
Or better yet, is your family celebrating?
While many parents are excited to start their family vacations and drop their kiddos off at week-long summer camps, we also recognize that the start of summer is highly anxiety provoking for a lot of folks.
This week on Sexvangelicals, Julia and I talk about taking a break from parenting this summer.
After all, as Julia mentions:
“Many parents may struggle to escape the pressures of parenthood because of the pervasiveness of all types of unrealistic expectations, which don't ultimately support family or relational health.”
Those unrealistic expectations include:
“Disciplining” your children in a way that will influence your child to change their behavior. (Discipline is much more about consistency of the parent than it is finding the magic formula that will appropriately affect your child.)
Providing numerous opportunities for your children so that they will be consistently engaged and entertained.
Immediately responding to your children whenever they initiate something, effectively allowing them to interrupt your process.
While there is limited research about how parents effectively (or ineffectively) navigate the transition into summer, we have all recently survived an extended break from school.
The COVID-19 Pandemic.
There’s a growing amount of research about how COVID-19 has impacted the development of children and adolescents. There’s also an awareness in the family studies community that families had to spontaneously make structural adjustments to meet the needs of their children in a season of pandemic.
To be fair, many families make these adjustments every May and June, as their children transition out of the tutelage of elementary and upper-level educators and into being in the home for longer stretches of time. While COVID-19 tested the reactionary and adaptive capacities of families, every summer, many families struggle with high volumes of anxiety during the first few weeks of summer, lacking structures and confidence to support the mental/emotional health needs of both child and adult.
Research on the impact of COVID-19 can help us identify the characteristics of families that are most and least at risk for anxiety and dysfunction during the transition into summer vacation. For instance, Felicity Painter, research fellow at the Bouverie Centre at La Trobe University in Melbourne, and colleagues interviewed 150 parents to assess for how they navigated the transition into the pandemic.
In their article, “The Lived Experience of Stress for Parents in the Context of COVID-19 Related Disruption”, published in October 2023’s Family Relations, Painter and colleagues identified six characteristics of families who experienced self-reported extreme levels of stress.
Relational challenges. This commonly involved absent or antagonistic interactions with coparents or other family members, leaving primary parents with either a lack of reliable options to support them, or the option to not collaborate with their co-parent in the name of emotional wellbeing. This was especially true in couples where there was an unequal distribution of labor, mostly from mothers.
Challenges with time. Parents reported an insufficient amount of time to meet the needs of their children, complicated by occupation requirements, such as working multiple jobs or jobs with minimal benefits, and limited finances. In the case of COVID, parents lacked the energy to respond to homeschooling; one may assume these parents may also struggled with providing structure during summer.
Contextual factors. Parents often struggled to access community- or government-based assistance, either due to time constraints, or the absence of community/government-based assistance.
The stress of children. Parents who had younger children were more likely to struggle with stress than those with older children. Parents who had children with medical conditions, higher levels of disruptive/defiant behavior, and emotional challenges that make transitions exceptionally difficult, also experienced more stress.
A perceived loss of control. These parents are highly aware of their inability to effectively engage with their children, as well as their perceived inability to complete administrative tasks. This loss of control, compounded by the fears of their children missing out on developmental and social growth opportunities, negatively impacted their relationships with their children.
A perceived sense of helplessness. Parents described this in two settings. First, parents who struggled to effectively navigate their children’s response to stress experienced higher levels of stress. Second, parents who experienced challenges protecting their children, either from the larger community (heightened in neighborhoods with resistance to mask wearing) or from unsupportive families of origin, were more likely to struggle.
Painter and colleagues also described four characteristics of families that experienced minimal stress in the transition to pandemic life, and presumably into the annual summer vacation:
Resources and privilege. The more factors that a family could rely on, be they financial, personal, or communal, the easier the transition into pandemic life, and presumably summer.
Awareness of privileges. Painter and colleagues noted that families who were aware of these privileges consistently experienced minimal stress. These family members were also able to describe the internal and external factors that helped them cope with the harder moments of transition from school to summer.
Gratitude. These families were able to reframe the pandemic and summer as a positive opportunity, often one that enabled families to slow down and spend more intentional time together. Prolonged breaks allow a family to reevaluate their priorities and values at a slower, more intentional pace.
Optimism. If gratitude is a momentary acknowledgment and thankfulness of privilege, optimism refers to a family’s confidence in their capacity to continue to sustainably invest and return to these internal and external resources.
Today, we invite you to comment about one of the following three questions:
What are ways that you and your family have navigated the transition from school to summer?
What factors have contributed to the transition from school to summer being difficult?
Do you have a tradition that helps mark this transition, akin to Dutch families hanging backpacks on flagpoles?
Looking forward to hearing your responses!
Let’s heal together!
Jeremiah and Julia